Movies
QuickGlance Movie Reviews
“Cowboys & Aliens”
Director Jon Favreau’s genre mash-up is more a mush-up, an action yarn aiming to be both science fiction and Old West adventure but doing neither all that well. The filmmakers — and there are a lot, among them 11 producers or executive producers including Steven Spielberg, Ron Howard and Brian Grazer, plus half a dozen credited writers — start with a title that lays out a simple but cool premise: invaders from the skies shooting it out with guys on horseback. For all the talent involved, they wound up keeping the story too simple, almost simple-minded, leaving a terrific cast led by Daniel Craig, Harrison Ford and Olivia Wilde stuck in a sketchy, sometimes poky tale where you get cowboys occasionally fighting aliens and not much more. Craig’s a stonyfaced amnesiac with a weird hunk of metal locked on his wrist who wanders into a dusty town just before alien craft swoop in and start abducting the locals. He joins cattle baron Ford’s posse to retrieve the missing and teach these creatures not to mess with hardy western pioneers. RATED: PG-13 for intense sequences of western and sci-fi action and violence, some partial nudity and a brief crude reference. RUNNING TIME: 118 minutes. ASSOCIATED PRESS RANKING Two stars out of four.
“Crazy Stupid Love”
For a movie that intends to be rooted in a recognizable and insightful reality, this features an awful lot of moments that clang in a contrived, feel-good manner. Because you see, it’s simultaneously trying to charm us. Sometimes, it achieves that goal. At the same time, it also has its share of moments that hit just the perfect, poignant note, with some laughs that arise from a place of honesty. When you assemble a cast that includes Steve Carell, Julianne Moore, Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone, you’re already on the right track. Because “Crazy Stupid Love” also aims to be a romantic comedy of substance and intelligence. Sometimes, it achieves that goal, too. That’s what’s frustrating here — the unevenness of it all. Carell stars as Cal, a nebbishy fortysomething whose high-school sweetheart, Emily (Moore), announces that she’s slept with someone else and wants a divorce. Drowning his sorrows nightly at a local bar, Cal finds an unlikely mentor in Jacob (Gosling), an expensively dressed womanizer who gives him a makeover. It seems unlikely Jacob would even give this guy the time of day in real life, but Gosling is charismatic as hell and surprisingly funny in the role. He also has a great, flirty chemistry with Stone as the one woman who sees through his game. RATED: PG-13 for coarse humor, sexual content and language. RUNNING TIME: 118 minutes. ASSOCIATED PRESS RANKING Two stars out of four.
“The Change-Up”
When you’ve got Ryan Reynolds and Jason Bateman — two masters of deadpan improvisational comedy — bouncing off each other, you should theoretically just be able to let the cameras roll and follow them wherever they take you. With a screenplay from Jon Lucas and Scott Moore, who wrote the original “The Hangover” you should already be in pretty good shape. But the too long film from director David Dobkin (“Wedding Crashers”) is all over the place in tone, veering awkwardly from some daring comic moments to feel-good sappiness and back again in hopes of redeeming some semblance of edginess. Learning lessons is what body-swapping movies are all about. Here, Bateman plays Dave Lockwood, a successful Atlanta lawyer who is married with three kids. His childhood best friend, Reynolds’ defiantly single Mitch Planko, spends his days doing bong hits in his man cave and his nights bedding as many random women as possible. Each insists the other guy has the better life. After too many drinks one night, they wake up the next morning and poof! They’ve switched bodies, which leads
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On the Edge of the Weekend
to some predictable but amusingly executed fish-out-ofwater scenarios. RATED; R for pervasive strong, crude sexual content and language, some graphic nudity and drug use. RUNNING TIME: 112 minutes. ASSOCIATED PRESS RANKING:Two stars out of four.
“Rise of the Planet of the Apes”
Silly humans. We’re so arrogant. We see a cute, cuddly baby chimp, assign all kinds of familiar charact eristics to it and raise it with the loving playfulness we’d give our own children, only to find that the creature’s unpredictable and ferocious animal nature wins out in the end. If the documentary “Project Nim” didn’t serve as enough of a warning for us earlier this summer, now we have this blockbuster, which is sort of a prequel and sort of a sequel and sort of a reboot. Mainly, it’s a spectacle. Sure, it might be trying to teach us a lesson about hubris. But mostly it’s about angry, ‘roided-up chimps taking over and wreaking havoc. This is not a complaint, mind you. This seventh film in the “Planet of the Apes” series rises to such ridiculous heights, it’s impossible not to laugh out loud — in a good way, in appreciation. There’s big, event-movie fun to be had here, amped up by some impressive special effects and typically immersive performance-capture work by Andy Serkis (Gollum from the “Lord of the Rings” films). But the idea that director Rupert Wyatt and writers Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver truly had anything serious in mind seems rather disingenuous. James Franco stars as the scientist whose drug tests to find a cure for Alzheimer’s lead to the birth of the super-smart Caesar. Freida Pinto and John Lithgow costar. RATED; PG-13 for intense and frightening sequences of action and violence. RUNNING TIME:105 minutes. ASSOCIATED PRESS RANKING: Two and a half stars out of four.
“30 Minutes or Less”
If this has indeed been The Summer of the R-Rated Comedy, with each new movie striving to one-up its predecessors in getting down and dirty, then we’re going out with a whimper here. And that’s ironic, given that the movie is all about something — or someone — going out with a bang. From the phoned-in (”The Hangover Part II”) to the fantastic (”Bridesmaids”), “30 Minutes or Less” falls somewhere in the mushy midsection. Like “Horrible Bosses,” it’s got a shaggy, sloppy vibe and characters who are in way over their heads, but it’s not nearly as consistently funny. It’s actually got more in common with the “The Change-Up” in that it’s frustratingly uneven, despite some appealing moments of buddy camaraderie. Jesse Eisenberg stars as a slacker pizza delivery man who’s kidnapped, then forced to wear a bomb and rob a bank, by a couple of doofuses (Danny McBride and Nick Swardson). Aziz Ansari plays Eisenberg’s best friend and reluctant accomplice. RATED: R for crude and sexual content, pervasive language, nudity and some violence. RUNNING TIME: 83 minutes. ASSOCIATED PRESS RANKING: Two stars out of four.
“Glee: The 3D Concert Movie”
This makes you realize just how crucial Jane Lynch is to the Fox TV show’s success. She’s nowhere to be found in this peppy concert film, shot over two days during the recent North
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American tour, and her trademark snark as cheerleading coach Sue Sylvester is sorely missed. Instead what we’re left with are the musical performances, which are admittedly glossy, highenergy and infectious, but they seem awfully earnest on their own. Director Kevin Tancharoen doesn’t offer much that you haven’t already seen on the ridiculously popular television series. The actors, in character, perform many of the songs that have become fan favorites with the same choreography and sometimes even the same costumes from the show. If you’re looking for revealing behind-the-scenes footage, forget it. And yet, if you love “Glee,” you’ll be psyched. These are your idols, leaping into your laps in crisp, bright 3-D. They’re all multitalented, dedicated young performers who have pulled off the difficult feat of working their butts off but making it look effortless and even fun. Fan testimonials and inspirational back stories grind the film to a halt; thankfully, Tancharoen keeps coming back to the music. RATED: PG for thematic elements, brief language and some sensuality. RUNNING TIME: 83 minutes. ASSOCIATED PRESS RANKING: Two and a half stars out of four.
“The Help”
A class act like this is rare enough in Hollywood. Coming at the tail end of summer blockbuster season, it’s almost unheard of. It’s the sort of film that studios typically save for the holiday prestige season in November or December, when Academy Awards voters start thinking ahead to the films they want to anoint. Come awards time, many of them likely will be thinking of “The Help,” whose remarkable ensemble of women offers enough great performances to practically fill the actress categories at the Oscars. From its roots as a collaboration between lifelong friends Kathryn Stockett, who wrote the best-selling novel, and Tate Taylor, the film’s writer-director, through the pitch-perfect casting of Emma Stone, Viola Davis, Octavia Spencer and their co-stars, “The Help” simply seems to be blessed. It’s hard to imagine a better movie coming out of the screen adaptation of Stockett’s tale of friendship and common cause among black maids and an aspiring white writer in Jackson, Miss., in 1963. RATED: PG-13 for thematic material. RUNNING TIME: 146 minutes. ASSOCIATED PRESS RANKING: Three and a half stars out of four.
“Senna”
You don’t have to know a thing about Formula 1 racing to become engrossed by this documentary. That’s because director Asif Kapadia has structured it with the pacing, tone and fluidity of a feature film. In tracing the brief and brilliant career of the late Brazilian auto racing star Ayrton Senna, Kapadia relies entirely on archival footage, some of which has never been seen before and much of which comes from inside the vehicle Senna himself is driving. This is from the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, long before the advent of contemporary NASCAR television coverage, with its multiple cameras capturing images from every possible angle. It’s raw and rough, and the signal goes in and out, which actually makes it even more of a visceral, immersive experience. Senna himself, though, was all about glamorous good looks and smooth, instinctive action. Kapadia follows the decade from when he first bursts onto the Formula 1 scene in 1984 at the Monaco Grand Prix and ends the film with the stunning crash that kills him at age 34. Digging deeper into his personal life would have made a good documentary great. RATED: PG-13 for some strong language and disturbing images. RUNNING TIME: 104 minutes. ASSOCIATED PRESS RANKING: Three stars out of four.